I had a vision on Saturday night. I had a vision that after I dropped my kids with their mom, I would find a box, or multiple boxes, of baseball cards in one of the local thrift stores. It had been a while since I’d checked for cards in thrift stores, and truthfully, it’s been a while since I’ve seen cards at said stores – a bit uncharacteristic given my past success.

I digress. My vision included me locating boxes filled with low-level items that others deemed not worthy of purchase, but would fulfill my desire for the time being.

As it turned out, the vision was somewhat accurate.

I walked into a Goodwill and as I was walking past the linens I saw a familiar sight: a 500-count box sitting on the shelf – the sticker price was $3.15. I opened the top and inside was a partial 1992 Stadium Club baseball set. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect as I’ve been building Stadium Club sets recently and figured that somewhere I would uncover such a collection of seemingly worthless cards that I could start that set. And here it was. The 1992 set is the sophomore Stadium Club release, which is somewhat disappointing, if not only for the fact that the clean 1991 design set the bar so damn high. Nonetheless, there are some fun images in the release. Including this classic Ruben Sierra, which oddly enough I featured almost 10 years ago to the day on this very blog. (Post)

I usually subscribe to theory that if there is one box sitting on the shelf, then there must be, or must have been at one point, at least one other. I checked another aisle and … jackpot. There was a 5,000 box, a 4,000 count box, and multiple smaller 100- to 400-count boxes. I quickly opened all of them and sadly it was all hockey, which I do not collect. BUT, I was in need of a 5,000 count box and the contents of the 5,000-count box sitting here seemed to be some higher-end brands from the mid to late 1990s, and I could see a small stack of Pacific bran releases. I checked the lid for the price. When I saw $8.75 printed there, the purchase was a no-brainer as the box itself would be $5 at the LCS.

So, what’s in the box? Short answer: Nothing major.

But, I enjoy nuance, so here goes nothing:

There was a complete 1996-97 Leaf Limited 90-card set, and a ton of extras, enough to be close to a second set.

There were several Pacific branded cards as mentioned above. A lot of these releases were sold as three-card packs, two standard size cards, and then one premium prism holographic card, gold, or lenticular style card. Of course there are the Crown Royale cards which are some of my favorites. Given that there were some two or three dozen here, I could see the value.

I was stunned by some of the quality of these releases. The Flair sets is akin to the baseball sets but these look far superior. And the Upper Deck McDonald’s release is very appealing.:

Of course there were classic hockey stars such as Gretzky, Lemieux, Hull, Roy, Fedorov, Yzerman, Jagr and more.

And parallels upon parallels. There were more than 100 1997-98 Leaf “International Stars.” The quality of these is pretty awesome. The car fronts feature a foil overlay map with the photo of the player emblazoned on top.

And whenever there are Pinnacle brands, you know we’re always looking for Dufex parallels (Rink Collection) and those pesky Artist Proofs which typically fell one every 36 packs, or one every 1.5 boxes.

The value of the items within these boxes will pale by comparison to some of my other finds, but this is hardly anything to scoff at. It was definitely better than finding a box chock full of say 1990 Donruss with stars, rookies and Hall of Famers stripped from the rows.